The Robotic Responses
Google Docs is becoming increasingly integrated with AI. One of these features, borrowed directly from Gmail, is “Smart Reply.” If another user leaves a comment on your document, Google’s AI analyzes the text of their comment and generates three pre-written, robotic responses at the bottom (e.g., “Sounds good!”, “I agree,” “Will do”).
While this might save a fraction of a second for mundane interactions, many professionals find these automated suggestions annoying, distracting, and impersonal. If you prefer to formulate your own thoughts and reply to your colleagues with actual nuance rather than clicking a generic AI-generated button, you can disable the Smart Reply feature entirely.
How to Disable Smart Reply
You can turn off these suggested responses within the Google Docs Preferences menu.
- Open your web browser and navigate to any open document in Google Docs.
- At the top of the screen, click on the Tools menu.
- Scroll down the dropdown list and click on Preferences.
- A popup window will appear. Ensure you are on the General tab.
- Look down the list of checkboxes for the option labelled Show Smart Reply suggestions.
- Click the checkbox to remove the checkmark.
- Click the blue OK button at the bottom of the window to save your changes.
The AI will immediately stop analyzing the comments in your documents. The little bubbles containing pre-written responses will vanish, leaving you with a clean comment box where you can type your own authentic replies.